The
intersection of three recent events – all anchored in the Cold War,
dating from its earliest days to almost its end – help explain what went
wrong with American democracy over the past half century and why an honest
recounting of history is so important to set matters right.

One of these events – dating
back to roughly the mid-point of the Cold War – was the revelation that
former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., led a 1969 raid against the Vietnamese
village of Thanh Phong, an operation that all participants agree went
terribly wrong, killing about 20 civilians.

Though there is heated dispute
about whether most of those killings were deliberate, what's not in
dispute about the raid is troubling enough. This was not a military attack
in the conventional sense. It was not a search-and-destroy mission seeking
out a military force for combat.

The raid’s goal was the
assassination of Thanh Phong’s village leader – roughly the equivalent
of mayor – who was suspected of Viet Cong activity. It was a
“takeout” in the military euphemism of the time, much like the
thousands of assassinations carried out by U.S. Special Forces teams under
CIA direction in the Phoenix program.

In 1969, Kerrey was a gung-ho,
inexperienced lieutenant with the Navy Seals, an elite commando unit that
was created in World War II for underwater sabotage. By the Vietnam War,
the Seals had changed. Like other Special Forces units, they had added
assassination to their military repertoire.

“Typically, Navy Seals undertook
kidnap or assassination missions, looking to eliminate Viet Cong leaders
from among the local population,” wrote journalist Gregory L. Vistica in
The New York Times Magazine [April 29, 2001] Quoting former Army
Capt. David Marion, the senior U.S. military adviser in the area in 1969,
Vistica wrote, “These were called ‘takeouts.’”

After being dropped off near the
Mekong Delta village, in the dark of night on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey’s
seven-member Seal team moved toward Thanh Phong. But his men were
surprised to find a hut that was not on the map.

Out of fear that the people in the
hut might alert the other villagers, Kerrey’s men slipped in and used
knives to kill the inhabitants, who turned out to be two elderly civilians
and their three grandchildren, according to The New York Times
article.

“Standard operating procedure
was to dispose of the people we made contact with,” Kerrey is quoted as
saying. “Kill the people we made contact with, or we have to abort the
mission.” Kerrey said he believed at the time the civilians in the hut
were a Viet Cong “security” attachment and that the hut was an
"outpost."

Gerhard Klann, the most
experienced member of Kerrey’s squad, gave the Times the most
detailed – and most damning – account of the brutality of the raid.
Klann tied Kerrey directly to the killings of the civilians in the first
hut, though Kerrey has claimed a faulty memory about his role in those
initial killings.

Cover Story

After the story surfaced last
week, Kerrey and the five other former Seals met to coordinate a counter
story. This joint statement, issued on Saturday, challenges some of
Klann’s account.

But the six Seals do not dispute
Klann’s statements about killing Vietnamese civilians in the first hut.
The joint statement said simply, “At an enemy outpost we used lethal
methods to keep our presence from being detected.”

What happened next is in greater
dispute. Klann says neither the targeted village leader nor any Viet Cong
fighters were found in the village. Nevertheless, when the search was
completed, the civilians – about 15 old men, women and children – had
been rounded up and concentrated in one location.

Kerrey and the other five former
Seals deny Klann’s account of a premeditated massacre. They claim they
were fired upon by someone in the village and returned fire, ultimately
expending 1,200 rounds of ammunition.

In earlier interviews, Kerrey said
he and his men eventually approached the huts and were shocked to discover
that the victims were all old men, women and children."The
thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding,
I don't know, 14 or so, I don't even know what the number was, women and
children who were dead," Kerrey said.

The joint statement issued
Saturday, however, seems to contradict even Kerrey’s original version of
events. “We took fire from these (enemy) forces and we returned fire,”
the statement said. “Knowing our presence had been compromised and that
our lives were endangered we withdrew while continuing to fire.”

The coordinated statement by
Kerrey and his five comrades dropped Kerrey's description of entering the
village after the firefight and finding the civilian bodies. [See the text
of statement as printed in The Washington Post, April 29, 2001]In the new version of events, the Seal team simply
returned fire and withdrew.

With the decision to coordinate a
response, Kerrey and the others created the appearance of suspects in a
crime getting their stories straight, rather than meeting individually
with Navy officials or journalists and giving separate, unrehearsed
recollections of events.

Victims

Two villagers in Thanh Phong gave
accounts to The Associated Press, Reuters and the Los Angeles
Times that generally tracked with Klann’s version of events. The
survivors recalled Kerrey’s team ordering villagers out of a shelter and
then shooting them.

Bui Thi Luom, who said she was 12
at the time of the raid, recounted the commandos entering the village and
demanding that the villagers come outside. Luom said she was with her
grandmother, four aunts and 10 cousins. The youngest was about 3.

The villagers initially thought
they only would be questioned and they sat on the ground as ordered.
"When a woman coughed, Luom remembers, one of the soldiers put his
gun in her mouth and ordered her to be silent," the Los Angeles
Times reported. "Luom's grandmother knelt and began to plead for
mercy. The soldiers talked among themselves, she recalled, and then opened
fire at close range."

Luom said she scrambled into a
shelter, escaping with only a wound to her knee that has left a scar still
visible today. "Everyone was screaming and very frightened when they
began shooting," Luom said. [Los Angeles Times, April 29,
2001]

War Crimes

While a few U.S. journalists have
given credence to the accounts from Klann and the Vietnamese survivors,
many news outlets – including The Washington Post and the Wall
Street Journal – have focused their coverage on sympathy for
Kerrey's anguish and cast doubt on the allegations of premeditated murder.

Yet, it's not in dispute that the
purpose of the raid was to assassinate a village leader believed to be a
Viet Cong supporter. It’s also not in dispute that the raid was mounted
in what was called a “free-fire zone,” meaning that the United States
and its Vietnamese allies had designated the territory open for the
killing of anyone living there.

Indeed, Kerrey used the
“free-fire-zone” argument last week in an attempt to defend his
actions. Citing the “unwritten rules of Vietnam,” Kerrey insisted that
the actions were justifiable whether his team was fired upon or not.
“You were authorized to kill if you thought it would be better,” he
said in an interview with The New York Times.

But assassinations and
indiscriminate killings of civilians are criminal acts under international
law as well as violations of generally respected canons of human rights.
If carried out by, say, Serbs in Kosovo or German forces in World War II,
these actions would warrant war-crimes charges – and did.

In Vietnam, however, these tactics
were the routine policy of the U.S. government, which bestowed medals on
soldiers who engaged in these practices. Kerrey received the Bronze Star
for his attack on Thanh Phong, which was misrepresented as a military
victory over a force of Viet Cong.

A few weeks later, in another
raid, Kerrey suffered a severe wound to his leg, which was partially
amputated. For that operation, he received the Congressional Medal of
Honor.

Barbarity

The underlying horror of the raid
on Thanh Phong was that this kind of barbarity was much more commonplace
than many Americans understood either then or now. The truth was that the
My Lai massacre that claimed the lives of about 350 Vietnamese civilians
on March 16, 1968, was not a unique case. It was just the one that gained
the most notoriety.

After a brief mention of the My
Lai massacre in My American Journey, Powell penned a partial
justification of the Americal's brutality. In a chilling passage, Powell
explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.

"I recall a phrase we used in
the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote. "If a helo
spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a
possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he
moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next
burst was not in front, but at him.

"Brutal? Maybe so. But an
able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West
Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while
observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The
kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right
and wrong."

'Hoopla'

To many American politicians and
journalists, the notion of killing unarmed civilians in the cause of
winning the Cold War is not even controversial today.

How blasé U.S. politicians can be
toward these atrocities was underscored by Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott, who commented about the Kerrey disclosures during television
interviews."I don't understand what all
the hoopla is about here," Lott said on Thursday.

Indeed, many national journalists
also appear to have found reasons to sympathize with Kerrey over the
slaughter of civilians. In 1998, Newsweek editors spiked a draft of
the Thanh Phong story after Kerrey decided not to run for president.

The reporter, Vistica, then quit Newsweek
and pursued the story on his own for a year, nailing down more details and
finally convincing The New York Times Magazine to run the story.

Kerrey only began talking about
the killings – giving his version of an accidental massacre – after he
knew the article would appear in print.

The Nazi-CIA Link

The second revealing recent news
event, with its roots at the start of the Cold War, was the disclosure of
CIA documents that prove beyond question that U.S. intelligence agencies
protected and collaborated with hundreds of Nazi war criminals after World
War II.

Over the past 25 years, dogged
researchers had pieced together much of this puzzle – despite denials
and stonewalling from the CIA. But the new documents, released on Friday
as part of a declassification ordered in 1998, established that the U.S.
government aided Nazi war criminals deemed useful to the Cold War. [Washington
Post, April 28, 2001]

Typical was the case of Gestapo
officer Klaus Barbie, who was known as the Butcher of Lyon for his
torturing and killing of Jews and Resistance fighters in France during the
German occupation.

After World War II, U.S.
intelligence protected Barbie from French authorities and spirited him off
to South America, the documents confirm. There, he worked for decades with
right-wing military governments that adopted many of the tactics favored
by the Nazis for torturing and murdering political enemies and their
suspected sympathizers. Many of those rightist governments had close ties,
too, to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence.

Cocaine Coup

In 1980, Barbie figured
prominently in a pivotal event in modern South American history: the
full-scale merging of political elites and the international drug trade.

Barbie was a principal organizer
-- within Bolivian intelligence agencies -- of a coup that saw drug lords
and their military allies overthrow the Bolivian government and transform
Bolivia into the first modern narco-state.

In the so-called Cocaine Coup,
Barbie collaborated with the Argentine military, which was then engaged in
its own “dirty war,” murdering and “disappearing” an estimated
30,000 citizens, including hundreds of dissidents who were shackled
together alive and shoved out of planes over the Atlantic Ocean.

Thousands of others were subjected
to barbaric torture, including rape, electric shocks applied to their
genitals and submergence in water filled with human waste, according to
later investigations by Argentine authorities. [For details, see Martin
Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

To help the Bolivian coup, Barbie
pulled together an international band of neo-Nazis who traveled to South
America and committed some of the most bizarre and brutal killings during
the Bolivian putsch. Torture specialists from Argentina were flown in,
too.

Besides labor activists and other
leftists, the coup makers targeted government officials who had
participated in jailing drug criminals, many of whom were freed and joined
the violent rampage.

One important outgrowth of
Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup was the creation, under Barbie, of a secure
pipeline of raw coca paste for a then-fledgling drug operation in Medellin,
Colombia. This operation later became known as the Medellin Cartel and
flooded the United States with vast quantities of high-quality cocaine in
the 1980s.

By 1982, Moon’s mysterious
wealth – much of it laundered into the United States from Asia and South
America, according to followers who have spoken out publicly – enabled
him to launch the influential Washington Times newspaper and
finance other lavish political operations for the American conservative
movement.

According to testimony by one
Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse, money from
Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez was laundered through a Miami front
company to finance the Cocaine Coup. Suarez's money also went to support
Argentine intelligence operatives who moved on to Honduras to organize the
Nicaraguan contra army, another group that soon became notorious for
murder, rape and drug trafficking.

Michael Levine, an undercover
agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in South America, wrote
later that the Bolivian Cocaine Coup set the stage for the Colombian
cartels to transform themselves into the principal suppliers of cocaine to
the United States.

“It could not have been done
without the tacit help of DEA and the active, covert help of the CIA,”
Levine wrote. [For more details, see Levine’s books, Big White Lie
and Deep Cover, or Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Reagan as Icon

The third recent event, helping to
explain why the American people know so little about these important
chapters of their own history, is the clumsy hardball politics employed by
Rep. Bob Barr, R-Georgia, seeking to coerce Washington’s Metro subway
system into renaming a subway stop after Ronald Reagan.

Barr threatened to withhold
federal funds needed to complete the subway system unless Reagan’s name
was added to the subway stop at Washington National Airport, which
previously had Reagan’s name attached to it.

Local authorities in Arlington
County, Virginia, have opposed the change, which would cost the
cash-strapped system several hundred thousand dollars. While seemingly
petty, Barr’s determination to deify all things Reagan is part of a
strategy that has made a careful examination of the past few decades all
but impossible.

That’s because the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980 was the turning point in the United States opting
for reassuring fantasy over difficult truth. Once in office, Reagan
reversed the critical examination then under way of the Vietnam War and
other Cold War policies, including the study of the CIA's original sin of
collaborating with Nazi war criminals.

Prior to Reagan’s election, even
Democratic Cold Warriors and conservative Republicans were acknowledging
that the Vietnam War had been a mistake. Many other Americans were going
much further, coming to recognize that the United States had inflicted
possibly millions of casualties in Indochina in what had become a racist
conflict that ignored Vietnam’s complex history and nationalistic
tendencies.

However, Reagan’s unapologetic
support for the Vietnam War – as well as for the Argentine “dirty
war” and the bloody conflicts in Central America where hundreds of
thousands of peasants were put to death – transformed
the shape of the debate.

As Reagan hailed the Vietnam War
as a “noble” undertaking, those who dared criticize U.S. human rights
violations were painted as unpatriotic, the “blame-America-firsters,”
in U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable phrase.

'Bad Rap'

Tolerance of Nazi-like tactics in
the prosecution of the Cold War became de rigueur for the
tough-minded careerists of Washington in the 1980s.

Backed by billions of dollars from
Rev. Moon and other right-wing financiers, a huge conservative
media/political network took shape. This Right-Wing Machine defended
Reagan and attacked anyone who challenged the new historical orthodoxy.
Soon, there were few voices left in Washington to tell the American people
the truth.

While Barr’s subway-stop scheme
drew attention -- and ridicule -- there are a raft of similar proposals
promoted by Republicans eager to prove their fealty to the former
president.

One plan would build a Reagan
monument on the crowded National Mall, another would add Reagan’s face
to the four presidents now on Mount Rushmore. One bemused columnist
suggested that the nation might simply rename itself “Ronald Reagan
United States of America.”

But the drive to transform Reagan
into an untouchable American icon is not just a case of overzealous
acolytes one-upping each other to show their devotion to the leader. It is
central to the goal of writing an Orwellian history for the United States,
one in which the horrendous crimes of the past half century-plus are
expunged from the national consciousness and only triumphal memories are
left.

Ironically, at a time when other
nations, including the former communist states, are examining the crimes
committed by their governments, the United States – the leader of the
Free World – only wants to let its citizens experience happy thoughts.

That is why the revelations about
the massacre at Thanh Phong and the disclosures about the CIA’s
assistance to Nazi war criminals are important.

Before the national news media
sweeps these disturbing facts back under the rug, the American people
should understand that the stories offer one more chance for the nation to
begin that difficult climb back to reality, back to a place where the
people of the United States – as responsible members of a democracy –
can view what was done in their name, the good as well as the bad.

Robert Parry is an
investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the
1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.